What Opportunity To Improve Are You Wasting

No matter how much the world of business may change, one factor will never change: Your most valuable sources of information are your customers. They will tell you what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, and what you need to change immediately to remain competitive. Customer advisory groups may be the best consultants you’ll retain. There are some guidelines you can follow to get the most out of the group.

If customers believe they’re only doing you a favour, getting them to join will be a difficult sell. Make sure potential members understand that membership provides an opportunity to improve their business as they help you redesign yours.

Select advisory group members who are perceptive, vocal and motivated to participate. “Figurehead” members selected for their fame or position, but who won’t attend group meetings or give follow-up a high priority, will be of little value. It’s up to you to demonstrate to members that you need their advice to serve them better. Unless there’s a crisis, schedule no more than two meetings per year. Gathering more often will be seen as a chore and an unreasonable imposition.

Membership in your customer advisory group should be an honour and a privilege. You want members to feel good about service. Treat them to the best transportation, parking, refreshments, meals and meeting space. Have the CEO give them their charge and put in an appearance now and then at meetings. Write up their recommendations in prestigious company publications, and thank them publicly.

The ideas that you get from your customer advisory group will enable you to advance the fortunes of your business. Implement the ideas that will work, and tell participants why you might choose not to implement others. If you ignore their suggestions or drag your feet in applying them, you may never again have customers who are willing to serve on the advisory group.

(c) Sandler Systems Inc, 2006

Happy selling!

Regards

Why Giving Your Customers Strokes is Profitable

Did you know that the most common reason that customers leave suppliers isn’t bad service … it’s lack of nurturing?

A child ignored by it’s parents will develop self-destructive behaviours to get it’s “strokes” even if they are negative. Being ignored is worse than no attention at all. Customers are the same.

Different Strokes
1. Fuzzies
2. Pricklies
3. Rubber bands

A fuzzy is a complement, an unsolicited positive stroke e.g “Good morning Bob, how are you?”, “Ana, you’re looking lovely” “Nice work Bob” or just sending an unsolicited cutting about a customer’s hobby or interests with a handwritten note saying “I saw this and thought you might find it interesting”

A prickly is a negative stroke – “Has anyone seen Marcus’s horrific tie?”, “Why do you always do that Marcus?” or when you say Good Morning, someone blanking and you not responding.

A rubber band looks like a fuzzy but is actually a prickly. “Has anyone seen the lovely tie Marcus is wearing….was it a present from his mother in law?”

Why A Fuzzy File?
I’m sure you get the gist. The point is, have you ever considered keeping a “fuzzy file”? What do your prospects and customers enjoy, what interests them, what do they get excited about. Doesn’t it make sense to get to know your customers and prospects and build up a fuzzy file of their interests, hobbies and family so that you can let them know you are thinking about them (without trying to sell them something).

RULE: All things being equal, people buy from people they like and trust. All things not being equal …people still buy from people they like and trust

It is not a crime to be liked by your customers. If you’re not taking care of your customers, who else is?

RULE: Customers leave you because they are stroke deprived, not because of bad service

What did you do in the last 3 months to demonstrate to your best customers that you appreciate their business?

What have you done to nurture your client relationships in the last 3 months?

What can you do in the next 3 months to protect your best accounts from your competition?

Happy selling!

A blatant sales pitch

When is a sales pitch not a sales pitch?

When it’s an interview.

Experience in sales has taught me that you’re infront of a prospect to gather information not to give it. How can you possibly prescribe before you’ve taken the time to diagnose?

How often have you seen a sales presentation that begins with the salesperson whipping out his laptop, powering up the machine and rattling off all the features and benefits of their product and service. The prospect sits there patiently, asks questions, shows interest, parhaps throws out the odd objection and calmly asks for a proposal – all good old fashioned buying signals. You leave after an hour or so satisfied you’ve done a good job. Then you never hear from them again or when you try to call them they’re in hiding and you’re in voicemail jail.

I’ve written many times before on the importance of a strong upfront commitment, and of closing at the beginning, and of passing objections back to the prospect but as I train more and more people I discover just how ingrained the culture of telling not selling is.

Selling has been defined as matching their needs with the benefits you can offer. Why do you think this definition may be deficient? Why do you think that type of belief is potentially lethal in the sale?

How can you better sell under the radar? How can your selling prevent the buyer from building up defence walls?

What behaviours you exhibit and beliefs that you hold today sabotage your success and hurt your earnings?

A fish rots from the head down

Bad selling and management habits are rife in today’s businesses. Company heads that allow these behaviours to persist could be leaving money behind that is equal to or greater than their current profits. Stuck in traditional selling paradigms, many company heads are actively encouraging these inefficient behaviours. Tough times need tough, disciplined management. CEOs, owners and investors that fail to weed these habits out now, only have themselves to blame when their plans for growth or exit deadline is inevitably threatened by poor sales performance.

In the good times, selling was easy. No-one’s balance sheet showed the true cost to win each sale. A discount here, another pitch, proposal or 200 page tender document there. It didn’t matter, as long as deals kept on coming. Revenue came in by taking orders, not by selling; really selling. Company heads who encourage these same selling habits will find themselves betrayed by them, because the success they think they bring has been revealed as an illusion.

Selling in recession requires real selling skills and a systematic, disciplined execution of the plan. Companies with order-taking habits are feeling the pinch as buyers ratchet up the pressure and exploit struggling salespeople’s psychological vulnerability and need to be busy.

If you lead, own or invest in companies delivering disappointing sales performance, look to yourself and your own behaviour. A fish rots from the head down.

When you discount, you subconsciously tell your people it is OK to discount. When you accept a “think it over”, you indicate it is OK to leave without closing or establishing a clear next step. When you give free consulting, your salespeople will spill their guts too. All these behaviours waste your scarce, technical and management resource and end in drawn out, expensive and hopeless sales cycles.

Look at your compensation and management systems, what habits do they really drive? Are they encouraging the opposite behaviour to what your company needs?

Sales people are creatures of how they’re paid and managed. If your systems encourage your people to chase revenue rather than profit, you are in real trouble. Chasing revenue means that they will hunt any suspect who can fog a mirror. They will spend their time and the company’s money writing proposals to non-prospects and taking part in unqualified beauty parades, only to find that they have nothing to show for it.

They will continue to forlornly forecast deals that died months ago just to keep the pipeline looking full and won’t ever close the file because they’re too emotionally involved in the outcome. Why does this happen? It happens when management allows it to and doesn’t know how to fix these problems or hold their salespeople accountable.

Managers who fail to dig deep and ask why a salesperson is about to eat into company resources or is still working long-dead deals need a wake up call. Wouldn’t you rather know early on if the prospect is wasting your time, rather than 2 or more months down the line, when you have already wasted £1,000s in time and resource chasing a mirage?

Never do anything unless you know why you are doing it. Always get commitment from the prospect as to what will happen next. Don’t accept non-committal, wishy-washy answers. Ask the difficult questions early, even if you don’t want the answers.

Stop trying to control the numbers. Face the cold hard truth. You can’t. You can only control the behaviour that generates the results. Teach your sales teams the right behaviours. Perfect practice makes perfect. Enforce a selling system that drives agreement between the salesperson and prospect and delivers predictable, timely results. Enforce consequences if commitments on behaviour are not delivered.

Before getting involved in an ITT, RFP or any other kind of beauty parade, make sure it is in the best interests of the company to do so. Demand that your sales team find out if the prospect really needs your help before they commit any resources to the sales process. Discourage easy yeses. There is no such thing. A positive prospect is no prospect. Get them to go for the ‘no’, to cut the deadwood out of your pipeline quickly. Send timewasters and your worst customers to the competition. Let them ruin their balance sheet.

You may think that it’s the market. You might accuse your salespeople of losing their courage. You could even believe it’s because no one is buying. These are all excuses. Seize responsibility for what is happening. Plan for the best, expect the worst and then take decisive action towards your goals. That last bit is essential for any plan to succeed.

Onanistic Management in Advertising Is to Blame for Crashing Revenues

Was anyone honestly shocked by last month’s league tables?

If you “sell” at cost or at a loss how can you be surprised when there’s no money in the bank account and you’re crashing down the league tables.

Agencies have got it into their head that it’s better to pay their big brand clients to have them in the portfolio than to make a profit. It might stroke the founder’s ego to get Dior, P&G or Astra-Zeneca as a client, but tell me how this makes any business sense.

What do they expect?

You operate on a 15% gross margin, then discount by 30% to be “competitive”. You tie up £millions worth of your highly skilled creative and operational account management time in unprofitable business, then throw your hands in the air when you can’t pay the bills and blame the economy for having to make swingeing cuts to your talented team.

Owners, founders, chaps at the top, lend me your ears. You’re in the profit business. Not a creative business. Not advertising. Not design. Not search. Not media. You are in business to make money. To make a profit. It’s better to make £10,000,000 and £1,500,000 profit than £1,000,000,000 and lose a penny.

But apparently the media industry is different. Moses came down and prescribed pitching as the only way to win business. “Open – Present – Close” he said and sure enough the faithful did what they were told. Well, that was over 5000 years ago folks. Things have moved on … a lot.

Imagine closing up front, then qualifying and then (if they qualify and have committed to buy from you), you present and they pay you what you’re worth. I know, it could never happen. God himself made the rules and anyone who bends or changes them is destined to a fiery afterlife and worldly damnation.

Shareholders of publicly listed companies should fire their senior management team if they allow a culture of discounting to prevail. Fire their account teams if they repeatedly over-service accounts without getting something of equal or greater value back in return. And if account managers see an opportunity to help a client that goes beyond the brief, issue P45s with alacrity if they dare fix the problem without at least getting a firm IOU or better still getting paid to fix it.

The time for pussyfooting around is long dead. Agencies are dying as you read this. Are you the cause of the problems you’re facing?